


These All Seeing Eyes

by IMakeMyselfLol



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Adorable Jester Lavorre, Caleb Widogast Deserves Nice Things, Caleb Widogast's Backstory, Discord: Widojest Love, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Love Confessions, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Realisation of feelings, the traveler pays attention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26637505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IMakeMyselfLol/pseuds/IMakeMyselfLol
Summary: “Caleb... You made the moon for me.”
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 22
Kudos: 166





	These All Seeing Eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-mansion reveal so who knows what Liam has up his sleeve to hurt my feelings more than I already have.

The mansion Caleb makes for them is nothing short of a miracle. The warm fire lit interior a blend of the best places they had been - all the comforts of The Lavish Chateau, the natural wooden feel of The Leaky Tap, the decor of their personal spaces in the Xhorhaus and the sweet scent of baked goods drifting through the air a comforting hug after an evening of fraught tension. That was before he had shown them their rooms, the spaces he had carved out for each of them individually in his world. Jester is still staring at the Nicodranis skyline that Caleb had perfectly recreated as a mural across the walls of her room as she sketches, the ceiling above like the night sky, and the canopy of her bed decorated exactly as her own had been. It even looked like her own careful brush strokes. All of that would have been enough to be getting on with. But then she spotted the little clay turtle, lovingly rendered to its exact location on the window sill, with a little buddy for company, and all of a sudden Jester felt like she could cry. 

A hand, familiar and fey, tilts her chin up from her sketchbook and she grins, wiping away tears before they can fall and smudge her work. 

“Oh, Jester. Why the long face?” Artagan smiles warmly down at her, hood already off. 

She laughs thickly. “Well. Look at it!”

The Traveler surveys the room, his pointed grin softening into something else, as he sighs and drops to sit at her side. 

“It’s a beautiful gift - but that’s not what has you all misty eyed Jester. I can tell. Go on, tell old Artie what’s going on in that wonderful head of yours.” 

Jester takes a breath, dabbing away the few lingering tears that litter her cheeks. “Ok ok ok ok. Do you remember I drew us dancing in that beer hall and the oops stone and everything?”

The traveler barks a laugh. “An inspired move, I recall that yes.”

“Right. Well. After that but kind of during it? It’s confusing. Afterwards Caleb told us that ickythong had made him kill his parents and that makes him make a lot more sense to me anyway because he’s been sad all the time since we met him and if that was what he was thinking about I mean of course he’d be sad right? And when we were talking about it he looked so upset and he tried to sort of… not make me be mean to him, but, it was like he wanted me to hate him for what he did kind of? Which is silly because the boy who did that is not Caleb the stinky wizard. The boy who did that would never have made this for us you know?” Jester blinked owlishly at the traveler, whose smile only got softer the longer she spoke.

“Tell me Jester,” Artagan began, coyness colouring his every word “you know that the rest of your party had some knowledge of the wizard’s past. Why do you think he was so… affected by an admission he already had made to almost all...except for you?” 

Jester thought about it. Why did Caleb seem so distraught towards her specifically? After all, she would never judge him poorly for something he had been made do in his past, just like she wouldn’t judge Yasha for what Obann had done to her. He was one of the few people she knew she could go to for comfort if she needed to, if she was not able to be happy, Caleb would be quietly there for her and she did the same for him. She cared about him, and he… “He cares about me?” 

“Go on.” Artagan encouraged with a hand waving.

“He cares about me and I care about him and maybe he thought telling me would change that? So he tried to convince me he was bad before I could do it myself even though I never would? Like a punishment? But he knows for sure that would hurt me and he wouldn’t do that, right?” Jester felt her heart clench at the thought of it, of being cast out from Caleb’s delicate circle of trust.

“Possibly. Or, have you considered, possibly, that he cares so deeply for you that he almost wants to push you away? Perhaps he enjoys your company so much that it has touched his little charcoal heart, and he does not see himself as being worthy of the feeling? After all, what greater punishment could he suffer than to lose you?” 

The question hung in the air between them, heavy in its conceit but heavier still in what it implied, in what it left unsaid. That Caleb, quiet and watchful and caring, had fallen for her. Jester stuttered for a minute, pulling a lock of her hair repeatedly as she considered what that might mean. “But, he… he can’t love me! In the beer hall he danced with anyone else, and he sent me away with Fjord.” She let herself imagine, for just a second, what Caleb loving her might look like. Her, wrapped in his arms, or with his head in her lap as he read and she sketched into the night, the way he might look at her with those blue eyes and blush the way he did whenever she pushed his buttons and then he might lean down and - she swallowed roughly. 

“Would that not make sense, if he wanted your happiness and his own devastation, to send you into the arms of someone else? I won’t pretend to understand the motivations of you mortal creatures, but… do with it what you will. I’ll leave you to it.” 

With that, he was gone in a flash of green light, and Jester was left alone in a room that Caleb had made just for her, exactly the way she would have wanted it to be made. Without ever having to ask. After he had spent a week crafting beautiful illusions for her, and giving her wings, and figuring out a way that she could go home to her mama anytime she wanted without having to even be out in the street to worry about Lord Sharpe, and asking nothing of her in return. He would have made a dick out of gold if it would have made her happy. She didn’t even have to try, and he loved her. Quietly, uselessly, poured love at her feet over and over and now she could see it she could drown in it. He _loved_ her. Did she love him? 

Jester thought about how they had first met, and how she had gotten off on the wrong foot because she had been so naive about the world, but Caleb never held that against her. She thought of how he had supported her, so certain of her strength and her intelligence even when she was not. How kind he was to her, and to Mama. The night they had waltzed together, and how it had hurt her just a little that he had thought of Astrid. The little amber lights he had shown her, their unicorn hamster and lollipop configurations designed specifically for her, the moment seared into her memory. How his hands had shaken when she tried to comfort him after the death of that Vollstrecker. The way he was learning to laugh, and make his own jokes, and smile. His long red hair shining now, how he had looked in the fancy clothes she had picked out for him; handsome, commanding, confident. His hands, turning delicate pages of ancient tomes, spattered in ink, weaving magic spells to life. How hot he was, even in sleep, an ember curled up in their pile in the dome. How heavy his heart had always been, but how kind he was in the face of it, how caring. Most of all, the way he looked at her, how it sometimes made her stomach fizz to catch him, the flush that would take over his face and his cute little ears as he quickly turned away. How could she not love him? How could she not have _known_? If Caleb would let her, she would make him so happy. 

Jester finds him, long after the others have gone to bed, in the library. He leans over a dark wooden desk, strewn with maps and pages of runes, absorbed, so Jester perches on a nearby armchair and waits for him to notice he is no longer alone. She sits, heart in her throat as she waits, her tail twitching frenetically at her back as she tries to think of what she might say. 

\--

Caleb sighs, running a hand through his hair as it falls into his face, finally catching sight of the tiefling staring up at him with her lower lip between sharp teeth. She is glowing in the low lamplight, her blue skin glittering like the sea and his heart thuds just to see her. The moment stretches out in silence, the longer it lasts the more anxious he grows. Eventually, after Jester, who is ever moving, like a ribbon in the wind, has spent a full minute sitting still just looking up at him and twisting the hem of her dress in one hand, he frowns, the worry palpable, but before he can say anything Jester is breathing in.

“Caleb,” she begins, “you know the way you’re always saying how I’m smart and stuff?”

Caleb blinks. Unexpected. “Uh, ja?”

She laughs, a little tinkling sound that somehow warms the room. “Well. I am smart - not a genius like you or Beau or anything like that but I am pretty smart about stuff right?” she asks quietly.

“Of course jester, I think you’re very clever. I think,” Caleb says, utterly assured, “it’s better that you’re not like me or Beau; we two spent a lot of time poring over books in libraries that would have been so dull compared to the fun you had gaining knowledge by getting into trouble” 

Again, her laughter lights up the room as she grins fully at him, and Caleb finds he has to look away, scanning the titles of tomes he had filled the shelves with. “Technically I could have been a big nerd like you Caleb but I was better at like, drawing and painting and pranks and stuff.” 

Caleb found himself chuckling at that. “Of course, after all you are the one and only as Veth would say, tycoon of tricks.” He meets her grin with his own for just a moment before she looks away.

“But what I mean is that... I amn’t like you and Beau or even Caduceus. I don’t always see like everything that’s going on all the time - my perception is like only _ok_ , you know, but I do see _some_ things ya?” Jester says, looking back to meet his gaze with bright eyes. Caleb wants to find every person who has ever made Jester feel small and banish them to the lower planes. 

“Ja... I admit I am not _entirely_ certain of what you are trying to get at here Blueberry - has someone said something that made you feel inferior? If so, know they could not be more wrong about you. You almost fought a god for your traveler, organized a convention, returned the minds and memories of your friends like it was a simple trick.”

“Cayleeeeb no one said anything about it don’t worry.” Her lilting voice dragged his name out in a way that no one else ever did. Sweet in a way that people rarely were to him. Even now, after all this time, it still tied his brain in knots trying to make sure that the sound of it is tucked away safely each time so he could, later, after Fjord has swept off with her to the open ocean or wherever the two of them might go, call the exact intonation back and remember how it felt to have someone so lovely be sweet to him. 

The two of them sit in silence for another while, Caleb watching with no shortage of confusion as Jester opened and closed her mouth, as if about to speak, and then struggling to find the words to express her thoughts properly. 

Jester smooths the frazzled hem of her dress down, completely wrinkled by her anxious hands. She looks up at Caleb, at the way he drinks her in like he is only waiting for the moment when she disappears forever with his heart in tatters, and words start to spew forth from her mouth. “My Mama taught me a lot you know, about people and like what they’re saying and doing - when I was little I would watch through little holes in the floor and the wall while mama entertained the guests and stuff - I didn’t you know, watch the _huh huh huh_ part obviously but I did see a lot of other things. Sometimes couples would come in to see my mama together, and that would be fun and Mama would sparkle and everyone would be blushing and giggling and, you know, happy to be there right?”

“I’m sure, your mother is a very charming woman.” Caleb tried not to let on how confused he was by the turn the conversation had taken.

“Ya she’s the best of the best. But sometimes,” Jester swallows hard before continuing “Sometimes I would watch through the little cracks, you know, and I would see that maybe one of the people in the couple was maybe not so happy to be there, and was maybe only doing it to make their partner happy but was getting hurt the whole time actually. The looks they could hide from everyone else, but nobody ever knew I was up there staring down at them so I could see it all like a big painted tragedy. And worst of all sometimes they would come _back_ for _more_ and I always wondered how no one else could see how broken that heart was.” 

There is a beat of heavy silence before Jester, wide eyed and guileless, breaks it. 

“Caleb... You made the _moon_ for me.” 

Caleb can feel the blood leaving his face stark as a sheet. He is poleaxed, the reality of what she is getting at finally revealed and now she is going to wreck what is left of his heart and he might just shrivel up and die right here. He had been so sure that she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t even suspect. After all her interest was in Fjord, why would it have ever crossed her mind? He deserves this, though. Knows to his bones that he does as he sits on the desk, head in his hands. Dimly, he registers that he is shaking, and Jester is still speaking to him.

“And, and all of these beautiful gates and fairies, and you gave me wings, and you sent your paw up after me when the moon weaver came, and you believe in me but then you’re dancing with Beau and pushing me towards Fjord and I. I don’t want you to use me to hurt yourself.” 

Jester is crying as she goes on, fat tears welling in her eyes and rolling unchecked down her cheeks as she chokes out painful truths. 

“I know you think you should be hurting forever because of what happened with your parents-”

Caleb interrupts, blunt in his delivery. “I _killed_ them Jester.” This is the truth of him. He is a killer. 

“I know you did Caleb. Did you like it? Would you do it again?” Jester asks, and he could be sick.

“ _No_ , gods, no.”

“You are a good man, and a great wizard and you don’t deserve to be punished.”

“But I do, Jester I... what I did. You would never even dream of doing what I did to your mother, none of you would.” He can still see his Mother’s burning face, her voice haunts his dreams even now. Suddenly, Jester is in his space, his vision filled with the draping fabric of her dress and then her hands, cool and grounding, are lifting his chin, and who is he to resist her?

“No, I wouldn't. But Mama didn’t send me to school with a man like Trent, who took you, a child, and tortured you, and experimented on you, and got in your head and changed it all around like Obann did to Yasha except worse because you were just a _kid_ and your family trusted him to guide you and so did you. And he broke your parents’ trust, and he broke _your_ trust in the most awful way possible but he doesn’t get a say in who you are anymore. He doesn’t get to make you hurt, and miserable, and empty like he did before. You are a different person then the boy that he tried to ruin Caleb. You are sweet and gentle and thoughtful and kind to me and to Veth and Yasha, and all of the nein. He wanted to make you heartless but you have such a big heart Caleb I don’t think your squishy body is enough to hold it. You’ve been hurting and hurting and hurting for almost your whole life and I don’t want to be just something else that hurts you. I am a _cleric_.” _I want to heal you._

She is a saint, a halo of gold orange firelight glowing at her back as she begs him to see. To ask her what it is she does want. 

"Jester, I...I'm sorry. I...am," he shrugs "I am a killer. That is not going to change. And I can't..."

"You're just a man, Caleb. I know your heart," She whispers into the scant space between them, reaching out one hand to rest over it, "I know what you did, how you think of yourself. But you said it yourself, I am pretty smart. Those things won't change my mind."

"And what is it,"  Caleb whispers back, knowing Jester can feel his pulse thrumming in his chest, " that you have decided?" 

"That I love you. And that, if you'll have me, I'm yours. If you want me, Caleb, if you let yourself, I think we will be _so_ happy." Jester's violet eyes bore into his, the depth of her conviction unwavering. Caleb thinks he might be in shock. This, cannot be real. He must have fallen asleep over his papers again. 

"This is a very strange dream to be having, even for me. I will admit it will be a very effective bruise to press in the morning"

"I can prove to you its real, Caleb."

"How?"

"Lean in," She breathes against his cheek "and find out." Caleb closes his eyes, prepared for dream-Jester to disappear as soon as he leans in, and goes anyway. How could he refuse her, even in a dream? 

He leans in, and she meets him halfway, her mouth eager and softer than anything he has every touched before, sweet with cinnamon and sugar, and so, so devastatingly, incredibly, real. She is kissing him, and she loves him and this cannot be his life.

" _Jester"_ he breathes against her mouth, " _Liebling"_ pulling her closer, and she opens to him, all but collapsing into his arms as his hands find her precious face. She kisses like it is air, like she will drown if they aren't touching and Caleb loves her. He loves her and breaks the kiss, leaning his forehead against hers as they breathe heavy. "I love you, Jester. I love you, and I don't deserve you." He whispers, willing her to understand. He wants, but he can't have. Anyone else would be better for her, more worthy of her affections. 

"You love me?" Jester asks, softly, her cheeks purpling with a blush as she looks at his lips and he catches her.

"Of course, with everything I am Liebe." 

"And you want me to be happy, ja?" Caleb feels his shoulders sink. She understands, then. 

"Ja, that is why-"

"Then make me happy Caleb. Make me happy. Love me, and let me love you, all of you - especially the parts of you that you think make you undeserving. We're fighting so hard to find our place in the world, don't you think it would be nice to rest? I'm tired of fighting, Caleb - we deserve to have things that make us happy that we don't have to second guess all the time. Aren't you tired of fighting?" They are still pressed together, forehead to forehead as Jester implores him to make a choice that should be so simple. She is what he wants.

"Ja, I am tired Schatz." 

"Then don't fight, not this. Open your heart," Jester smiles wide, her face gleaming, and Caleb loves her and loves her and loves her "to chaos." 


End file.
